Gun violence overlaps into our basketball community (again)

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I'm almost too depressed to type this. I think I'll just do a little stream of consciouness -- I can't really think about organizing paragraphs and coming up with a good way to express this. When someone you know dies and you know you will never see that person again, let alone say hello to him/her, that's a bitter pill to swallow. When that someone dies by gun violence, simply put it just feels worse. And I can hardly imagine how it feels when that someone is someone close to you, as in, an immediate family member.

Jason DelaCruz was shot and killed at around 2am outside a pizza and bar area of San Francisco. Jason is the brother of former Vegas tourney MVP Jeremy DelaCruz. Jeremy's been my teammate before in dreamleague and a long-time member of renowned Filipino tourney team the Bay Area Wizards, as well as the Bay Area Heads. Dozens more here in the Bay's Asian American basketball community probably know Jeremy and Jason better than I do. I never really met Jason, but I did see him make a couple cameo appearances on the court with his brother's strong NL-caliber teams. The thing I most remember about him: he's the spittin' image of Jeremy...

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All-Star violence and Tommy Davidson

There's a rather hot debate in the NBA blogosphere right now, summed up best by TrueHoop, that doesn't paint a beautiful picture for the Average Joe (or Poor Man Commish) to attend All-Star Weekend. It also reaches into the problems of violence in American society, with which we've previously compared to Iraq.

Interestingly, in this month's issue of Black Enterprise (which has a terrible archive search section where I couldn't find a link to the article), comedian Tommy Davidson was profiled by Kenneth Meeks. Davidson disclosed his very profound beliefs and passion in life to try and fix these very ills...

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The casualties of (Civil) War

Some disconcerting news over the past week or so. It's funny how these stories pile up over the course of one week. I was only going to report on one of them, then one became two, which became three, then four...

Mark Cuban reported on Genarlow Wilson. After you read the gripping and infuriating ESPN article on Genarlow, written passionately by Wright Thompson, you'll definitely want to go sign the online petition. Sign one for each of all your family members, please.

We've written about James Love, Allen Iverson and Kevin Johnson, and the "Iraq at home" before, and Genarlow's hometown seems to similarly have a high crime index when compared to a big city like SF.

Things don't get any brighter with Richmond High hoops star Eli Holman forced to move away from the "Iraq at home" so he can attend Indiana University next year in one piece, in a story told by SF Chronicle's Chip Johnson.

And speaking of Iraq, guess what suffers from the zero-sum game of war financing, "a casualty of other wars" (from Josh Meyer of the Los Angeles Times)? Yep, the very war on drugs, of which our kids who love to hoop just like us are trying to avoid becoming innocent bystander victims.

In the SportsBusiness Journal this week Femi Shote reports that William C. Rhoden's book, Forty Million Dollar Slaves, whose title is a reference to a fan who heckled former UNLV and NBA star Larry Johnson as "nothing but a $40 million slave", is basically on point:

Rhoden demonstrates how reintegration [of the modern black athlete into white ownership structures and institutions] resembles a reckless mining operation when precious raw materials are extracted, leaving the environment, the cultures and the people of the area laid to waste. Reintegration extracts the labor of black athletes but leaves black institutions in ruin.

As an observer who is neither white or black, at first you wonder if the term "slave" attached to a $40 million NBA contract isn't disrespectful to those ancestors who were truly slaves, just as you wonder after watching the movie The Pianist if "ghetto" is an appropriate term for the modern-day "projects", but then you consider some of the environments that young blacks and perhaps other people stuck in similar class structures must grow up in, the James Loves, the Genarlow Wilsons, the Kevin Johnsons, the Eli Holmans...and you start to see their point of view.

It's as if there's an invisible Civil War going on.

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First story dedicated to James Love

Back about one week before the Warriors' Nov 16 game against Sacramento, we got another yearly donation of 25 tickets from Abusheri Ohwofasa from Warriors Community Relations. I sent out the usual Evite to all the dreamleaguers who have helped us, encouraging them once again to bring out the kids they work with.

I hadn't used the Evite since last season and noticed that James's sister Inez was still on the list, the only one in the Love family with whom I had an email address. That prompted me to call Ibyn, but his phone number had since changed...

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